whdc
commented
6 years ago Objections (from a real person) and responses.
(1) If meaning is whatever leads to reproductive fitness, why should human beings hold on to universal rights or extol sacrificial service? It makes sense to be loyal to your clan and family, since that helps your genes. But why should you help a total stranger or an ethnic outsider? You might say that is a cognitive glitch to when people lived in small tribes, but we still think it’s morally commendable to show kindness to strangers. And evolutionary psychology might provide a description of morality and meaning, but doesn’t tell us whether we should do something. If someone understands their altruistic bent or love of family is only their evolutionary emotions speaking, why shouldn’t they try to transcend their programming and act selfishly? I think evolutionary psychology is insufficient to provide an all-encompassing theory for meaning and morality.
You basically said it yourself: my descriptive theory of meaning isn't a prescriptive theory of morality. Why is that a problem? Why should a theory of meaning have to bolster our moral sensibilities? If a screwdriver can't pound in a nail, would you discard it for that reason?
(2) When people talk about “the meaning of life,” they mean something that transcends circumstances. In other words, meaning, by its nature is eternal and true in all circumstances. This is why death is the ultimate test of meaning. If your meaning in life cannot survive death, then your meaning in life is brittle and unsustainable. If the naturalistic view is that these sentiments are just cognitive illusions (mental tricks to get us to propagate the species), then the atheistic worldview violates our very humanness. For example, let’s think about love. The evolutionary psychologist will say, this is an emergent emotion designed for reproductive fitness. But to think that is to violate love. Love isn’t just useful for gene propagation, but it’s a window into truth and the ultimate meaning of life. Which worldview resonates with the human condition? And which worldview violates our very humanness? Should this be a test of truth? Whether it is livable?
I can't tell if this is a response to what I wrote, or a general musing on "the meaning of life". My account of meaning certainly explains how meaning survives the death of an individual, as any mechanism for genetic propagation tends to survive the death of an individual. If it was good enough for my father, it's probably good enough for me.
(3) You haven’t answered why evolutionary psychology is logically a replacement theory for God. It’s like a biologist who says, “evolution therefore no God,” or a geologist who says, “plate tectonics therefore no God.” Intermediary mechanical explanations for how nature works doesn’t negate the supernatural origin of the world. Secondary causes doesn’t preclude primary causes. Why should the atheistic position be the default?
Here it seems as if you are replying to something else, and not to what I wrote. I wrote that you could take my account of meaning and append "... and God made it that way", and you'd still be a theist but the account wouldn't require God to work.
(4) Let me address something very practical and personal. Is family a good meaning of life? I think it’s a good intermediary meaning (as God designed it to be), but not the ultimate meaning of life. Because what happens when suffering or tragedy or death strikes? Will, if your family should perish, could you go on? Or is all purpose and meaning destroyed? Christianity gives me a meaning in life I can’t lose — the love of Christ. And all my good things can never be truly destroyed because the Resurrection will be the restoration of all that is good.
A "good meaning of life" is not the objective of a descriptive theory. I was trying to explain why things are as they are, not how things should be. In any case, I would fare badly if my family perished, because love without the possibility of heartbreak does not exist.
This is the Christian hope: (1) Your bad things will turn out for good, (2) Your good things can never be taken away from you, (3) The best is yet to come. I think that’s the most beautiful meaning in life imaginable. That doesn’t mean it’s true. But it’s deeply satisfying and joyful. Atheism, by contrast, is an ugly scar of a truth, arid and empty.
Quite honestly, I feel that hoping too much in another life is an arid and empty way to live. But that is a matter of opinion. I can go on if you like — that could be a fun discussion.
Theists often assert that without God, life can have no meaning.
I hold that meaning, like beauty, justice, love, and so many other things, emerges from our circumstances. We are sensing, thinking animals that need to make a lot of good decisions in order to survive and reproduce. That causes us to pay attention to some things (that's meaningful!) while disregarding other things (that's meaningless!). It also causes us to associate things with their uses or consequences. And that's meaning. Of course it is possible for individuals to give up on meaning. It's all meaningless! It's just cold, hard, physics! But these people don't survive and reproduce as well as others that saw meaning in things, so we're left with a population of human beings that mostly feel that life is full of meaning.
This theory of meaning has some explanatory power. It easily explains why most people tend to say that their family, and in particular, their spouse and children, are among the most meaningful things in life. This is the only way things can be if meaning serves the cause of the proliferation of our genes.
People rate as meaningless things like video games and narcotics, or more precisely, the excessive consumption of such things, because they lead to poor reproduction potential. It's comical when put this way, but it's obviously why people say "I'd never date that guy because he's a total geek/stoner/etc".
People assign great significance to beauty, even though moralists, both religious and secular, discourage it. Beauty is an indicator of reproductive fitness, either directly or as an indicator of wealth, and as long as those correlations exist, beauty will continue to be a weighty concept.
Since many things relate to survival and reproduction, meaning spreads to many things: a job, a hobby, a movie, a book, a friendship, a conversation. We don't have to posit that a person experiencing a meaningful thing is thinking that moment about survival or procreation — that would be absurd. But the things that, on one level, are the meaningful things in life, are on another level, its substance.
People are social animals of the highest order, so we invest a lot of significance in every aspect of culture. This somewhat loosens biology's grip on meaning, because it means that some notions of meaning can propagate memetically, leaping from one individual to another without the need for biology to confirm that there is survival value in such ideas. But such things — let's call them fashions — are not guaranteed to stick around for a long time, and they often strike later generations as quaint or ridiculous.
A special case of this is language. Words are mostly arbitrary associations between sounds and things, but so useful that they tend to have pretty long lives, and they seem such a fixture of life that no one finds them weird — until times change and the word falls out of style. Today if I call someone a hlaefdige, it would certainly not be taken as a compliment, though in Old English it meant 'lady'.
Words are memetic and life is genetic, but the impermanence of words mirrors the impermanence of meaning itself. When our circumstances change so greatly that we are no longer quite the same species — if we are lucky enough to get to that point — we will surely find different things meaningful.
Now, a theist might say: if this is all there is to your account of meaning, then you are missing the forest for the trees. Don't you see that ultimately, meaning arises from the nature of God, who spoke the world into existence? And I accept that this is a possible explanation of meaning. In fact, you could just take my account of meaning, and append "... and God made it that way," and you'd be a theist, but it'd be clear that you don't have to be a theist in order to partake in meaning.
As for whether theism provides a better account of meaning, I don't think so. One can attribute all kinds of things to the nature of God, even when constrained by a scriptural tradition. A good theory is like Cinderella's glass slipper: it's hard to alter and it miraculously fits something else. The diversity of theistic thought and expression makes it clear that theism is not like that.
Of course the real reason theists connect God and meaning is not that they seek a descriptive theory of meaning. Rather, they preach a prescriptive theory of meaning that is backed by divine authority. Their audience might not perceive that meaning is emergent, and might gladly accept a prescriptive theory, along with the God that prescribes it.